Cogna earns $15 million for its AI-powered ERP platform

Cogna Ltd., a UK-based enterprise resource planning company, launched today announced that it raised $15 million in new funding.

Notion Capital led the Series A round with participation from Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures. The raise comes months after Cogna closed its initial $4.75 million investment. This last round included participation Hermann Hausera prominent technology entrepreneur who played a key role in launching Arm Holdings plc.

Enterprise resource planning platforms, or ERPs, are complex software suites that companies use to run their day-to-day business operations. The feature set of these products typically covers sales, marketing, procurement, regulatory compliance and a wide range of other use cases. Companies buy ERP software in part because it eases data management tasks, such as sharing business information between departments.

A typical ERP platform can take several months to implement. Cogna, on the other hand, promises setup times of up to two weeks. This speedup comes in part from the fact that the company is using artificial intelligence to speed up certain aspects of the setup process.

The Cogna platform ships with a chatbot-like interface powered by large language models. Workers can enter natural language descriptions of business tasks they want to perform more efficiently. Using the information provided, the Cogna platform generates a customized software tool capable of streaming the specified jobs.

A client might, for example, inform the platform that the accounting team is struggling to find the best way to split a budget between three application projects. In response, Cogna could generate an analysis tool that would make it possible to simulate different budget allocation scenarios. Workers can optionally use natural language instructions to customize the tools the software generates.

Business planning is not the only task that Cogna promises to make easier with its platform.

A company’s external documents, such as contract bids submitted by suppliers, are often formatted in different ways. This complicates tasks such as identifying data entry errors. Using Cogna, a company can create a portal that allows suppliers and other third parties to submit documents in a uniform format.

Field Service is another use case that the software manufacturer is targeting. According to Cogna, organizations can use its platform to share data about a malfunctioning piece of equipment with the technicians sent to fix it. The company’s ERP platform also lends itself to other use cases, including human resources, regulatory compliance, customer support and several other areas.

Many of Cogna’s clients operate in asset-heavy sectors such as the utilities, manufacturing and construction segments. The company says its software has helped some of these organizations realize more than $10 million in annual cost savings.

Cogna is not the only ERP startup that has raised venture funds recently. In August, Opkey grab a $47 million Series A round for the software testing app of the same name. The tool helps companies check updates to their ERP implementations for errors before releasing them to production.

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